The Heart of Marriage

Back in 1996, at the time Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, I wrote a story for this magazine suggesting that individual states might have different types of unions for same-sex and heterosexual couples. Seventeen years later, that seems like a quaint and very outdated idea. As David Von Drehle's cover story makes clear, over the past four decades there has been a rapid evolution in thinking about same-sex marriage. Whatever the Supreme Court decides, it seems clear that the majority of Americans feel marriage is a civil right and that denying that right to people because of their...